SEO (14)

My day-to-day work is as a consultant specializing in SEO (search engine optimization) and Joomla! CMS. Thus, I will write about SEO in general, and how you can implement Joomla SEO in the best way possible. How to make Joomla websites search engine friendly is something many people ask me about. It's a very interesting subject as it can impact your business quite significally to get your site indexed in the search engines and achieve good rankings for important words and phrases.

If you have any suggestions about Joomla SEO, please don't hesitate to contact me by email at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

The robots.txt file is a small file located in the root folder of your Joomla site. The file contains instructions to the search engines on what to index and what to leave out.

Some people confuse the robots.txt file with the .htaccess file. The difference is significant. The first one only gives instructions to search engines - and most search engines respect it. The robots.txt file is not used for anything related to security. Nevertheless, it can have an impact on Search Engine Optimization.

The .htaccess file, on the other hand, is used to reconfigure the settings of your Apache server, redirect URLs and other server related tasks. More about that in a later post.

If you have a Joomla website, you probably want it to be visible in the search engines. And particularly in Google.

There are many things you can do to get your Joomla site indexed in Google. But how do you make sure that your site is visible on the right keywords and phrases? What I mean is: How do you know that the words you use are the ones that people use when they search for your products or services?

To be successful with Search Engine Optimization (SEO), you need to optimize for the correct words and phrases.

But how do you know what people search for when looking for your products or service? You need to do some research: Keyword research.

The tool I use for keyword research is Market Samurai. It's a great piece of software and available as a free download to try it out.

Both of the posts mention Google Webmaster Tools and how to use various functions of these useful tools.

I recently figured out, though, that many people have trouble understanding how to verify their Joomla website in Google Webmaster Tools.

By verifying your site with Google. you tell them that you are the owner of the website and that they may show details about the site to you. Without verifying your site you won't get access to a lot of the more advanced functions of Google Webmaster Tools.

Read on to get the full instructions on how to verify your Joomla site in Google Webmaster Tools.

This is the third part of a series of posts on how to work with meta elements in Joomla.

Meta tags are tags, or meta elements, that (mostly) contain information about the website or page which is not shown directly to the user. In this part I will show you how to use the meta tag functionality in sh404SEF to improve your site SEO.

If you have the SEF (Search Engine Friendly) component sh404SEF installed, the meta tag management is more flexible than with the built-in Joomla solution. You will be able to enter meta tags for any page on your site. This involves for instance that you may enter meta elements for blog and section views, as well as for following pages automatically generated from these views (i.e. page-2, page-3 etc).

Remember to always use the hyphen character (-) in your aliases. That way, you'll get more value from your URL keywords. Google treats hyphen (-) like a space, while it treats underscore as a non-breaking space.

I regularly scan the unanswered questions in the Joomla forums. Many times, the questions posted have to do with how the output of Joomla is presented. This may have to do with the template, but oftentimes it has to do…

Are you lost? Sorry, but the content you requested could not be found. Did you write the correct address? You have a few options now - don't despair: - Use the top menu to navigate my articles- Visit the sitemap…

Sometimes, you might want to create a Joomla page that is not available through a menu. You only want the page to appear when the URL is entered. This might be a 'thank you' page after form submission, a log…

Last week, I did a post on how to add Javascript snippets to Joomla. The way I did this was by adding module positions to the template. In this post, I will delve deeper into how to add module positions…

Even though Joomla is a great platform as it is, there are times when you will have to alter the core files to fit certain needs. For instance, you can't stand how the elements in Joomla content are put together…

Earlier this week, I explained how to add a link to a PDF file to an article by using the Joomla core installation. This time around, I will show you how to accomplish the same using the File Manager plug-in…

Finding a great template for your Joomla site can be a challenge. There are tons of free Joomla templates out there, but to be honest: Most of them are junk. Finding quality free Joomla templates is important to ensure you…

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